SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – After the defeat of the so-called Islamic State caliphate, Kurds now have to focus their energies on the political battlefront, the head of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) press office said in an interview late on Friday.
“These military victories and achievements have to be turned into political achievements through political relations,” Mustafa Bali told Rudaw TV, speaking from Sulaimani.
The SDF declared the end of the ISIS statelet on March 23, after defeating the group in their last bastion of Baghouz, eastern Syria. The Kurdish-led force, backed by the global coalition against ISIS, pushed the militants out of 52,000 square kilometres of Syrian territory, liberating nearly 5 million people from the jihadists’ tyranny. In the years of war, the SDF lost more than 11,000 of their fighters and another 21,000 were wounded.
The SDF’s political wing, the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), has now taken over, leading the political battle and shoring up international support. The SDC sent a delegation to France to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday.
Macron “promised to continue military, civilian support to fight and uproot terrorism in Syria, and [stressed] the need to maintain stability and security in the region from any threat,” SDC co-chair Ilham Ahmed told Rudaw after the meeting.
Ahmed has racked up air miles this year, visiting Washington in January and London in February. An SDC delegation also visited Moscow late last year and they have opened the door for negotiations with Damascus, though these have not taken off yet.
The Syrian crisis is not only regional but international, thus it needs to be resolved internationally, explained Bali. The Kurds also want to get the Kurdish issue onto the global agenda.
“It is the goal of our diplomatic delegations in the future to make the Kurdish issue in Western Kurdistan (Rojava) discussed in meetings,” he said.
The Kurdish administration in Rojava has been left out of UN-led peace efforts in Geneva and Turkey, which considers the Kurdish forces a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has lobbied hard to keep Rojava out of the process to draft a new constitution.
Asked whether SDC’s meetings with France could harm relations with Damascus, which objects to foreign support for Syrian opposition groups, Bali pointed to the presence of Iranian and Hezbollah forces in Syria backing the government. Syrian sovereignty is “already violated,” he said.
“The regime does not have the right to prevent a solution. We have always said that Syrian crisis is a democracy crisis that can be resolved through dialogue,” he said.
The government of Bashar al-Assad “always prefers military options” so the Kurds are “obliged to knock on any door that can bring political and diplomatic solutions.”
While the focus is now on politics, the threat of ISIS remains. There are “thousands” of ISIS militants still northern Syria, using insurgency tactics to carry out attacks, said Bali.
“We, as Kurds in general not only as the people of Rojava, have to know very well that geographic victories over ISIS cities and regions never means that ISIS is eliminated. ISIS still poses a threat, especially against Kurds,” he said.